My home lab build has been taking rather a long time to materialise. Due in part to some incomplete planning and research on my side. I originally was excited by virtuallyghetto‘s post on a Mac Mini ESX cluster using VSAN which he then later upgraded to Intel NUCs. I thought great but as I researched into how to actually build such a thing I found his posts a little lacking on details.
So a spent a few days on ITPro TV watching the VMware Certified Professional VCP5-DCV course videos and I have a much better idea of how this is going to come together. But a worry started to percolate into my conciousness…
How would I license the damn thing?
A quick look at VMware’s online store quickly revealed that the cheapest kind of commercial license would easily exceed 8K AUD.¹ Not exactly my idea of a cheap setup. Plus VSAN would cost an extra 1K per CPU.
This is getting ridiculous, I thought.
At this point I was beginning to think virtuallyghetto rather oversold VSAN as a “great home lab solution“. Maybe only VMware insiders got to play with this stuff.
Disappointed, I turn my attention to my clients hardware refresh. They would really need a good small scale ESX solution and maybe I could design one up for them first. Using my newly gained knowledge I came up with a design I was pretty happy with (and which I’ll cover in a future post).
Thinking about licensing again, I found a great post on Wahl Network which laid out a few ways to get a home lab licensed affordably. Most notably joining the VMware User Group and signing up for VMUG EVALExperience.
And so the home lab build is back on track! But now the production build I designed is actually more exciting and may come to fruition first. Watch this space.
1. Yes I could have just gone with the standard essentials kit but what’s the point if you don’t get to play with vMotion and HA?
The Infosec Noob 